Doing OT in OU - A Deep Dive into Over/Under

The logo for Over/Under.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Game Designer Intentions
3. Ground Zero
   • Let the Con Begin
4. A Love Letter to Lit Majors
   • A Pound of Flesh
   • Terminology
   • Code Breakers Club/Heimlich Expedition
5. Choke Night/Choke Incursion/Choke Event
   • Me, Bleeding Out
   • Airtight Intel
   • What makes good RP?
6. Safety Tools & Other Things
   • Discord as a Game Space
7. Keeping the Peace
   • Violence through Roleplay
8. Game Economy
9. And what of it?
10. Conclusion
11. Additional Reading/Listening

Introduction

With Over/Under ending close to 2 months ago, I have the distance needed to give a thorough deep dive into my experience with the game, where I wormed my way into the mechanics, and how I capped it all off with an in person meetup at PAX Unplugged.

I've written about my experience with O/U a little bit already. Those posts covered one of the friction points players and bosses kept feeling throughout the game's 28-day duration, while the other was a more personal journey on how my character, Jules, went from an everyday Teamster to CEO of the bank, Prospero's Trust. My goal with this post is to simultaneously highlight my time in the game, while also discussing the framework of Over/Under in a broader sense.

I am making the assumption that you know what Over/Under was and will not provide a brief on it here. If you'd like to read an overview on it, please check out Sam Sorensen's blog post about it.

WARNING: Spoilers for A Pound of Flesh, the Mothership module included below.

Game Designer Intentions

If you're a creative in any space, you have some expectations on how your work is utilized. As designers, we try to consider edge cases and/or provide guidance when some situations occur. In tabletop, this is nigh impossible, and when technology is included, it adds another layer of difficulty to the process. Sam has stated over and over how he didn't expect the turnout and engagement in O/U to be so high. He originally told Bosses that would be thirty minutes to maybe one hour of their time each day.

Even though a majority of the player base had no direct way to engage with the boss-level mechanics, many players did impact them indirectly through roleplay and espionage. Player falling in and out of love with other players who became Bosses made a significant impact on the game.

Many people would say Over/Under was a month-long Live-Action Roleplay (LARP), but I don't believe LARP accurately captures the sense of how Text-Only Online Roleplay (TOORP) function. There is no physical space in TOORP. Rather, it's a collaborative space of world building where each person present adds to the space in the actions their player takes. Every action the character takes is described in third-person with dialogue provided, at times whereas in LARP, you do what your character would do in real life but acting, physically and emotionally, as someone else. There is a lot of overlap, for sure, but the heavy reliance on language garners something different. When a player describes an action in text, it's subjectively taken in thousands of different ways. This is where the syntax and format of language matters. Character would type in headers to denote they were yelling, or if they were attending an event, they'd write in subscript to denote whispering. This, in conjunction, with emojis adds a dimensionality that LARP can't do in the same way.

An excellent example of this was a character in O/U, the Mime, spoke almost exclusively in descriptive text and emojis. It was delightful and a true test of what can be conveyed via text.

Ground Zero

Having been a supporter of the 1e crowdfunding campaign of Mothership, I was receiving news about this game in a Discord server called Over/Under. At the time, I only played Mothership once or twice and liked it well enough to back it. My interests on the internet kept having Over/Under come into my orbit, and it smacked me right in the face when I saw an email from Amanda Lee Franck, offering avatars for people who were playing O/U. I am a super fan of Amanda's work, both her adventures and art, so I fired off a quick email asking for one and joined the Discord server on day 1. My character description included my go to character in Mothership sessions, a nonbinary Android named Jules in overalls with a cigarette loosely hanging out of their mouth.

The first day in the Discord server overwhelmed me, and I didn't look at much anything except a thread on how to join the Union. I knew getting into a faction was important, because I needed credits to cover the 02 Tax on the station, so I didn't die.

When I heard more chatter about the game and experiment from my peers, I gave it a second glance. It wasn't until Amanda sent me my avatar that I committed to whatever this whole thing was. I didn't come in with a big background or plan for my character. It turns out, I was mostly playing myself and that suited me fine most of the time.

Let the Con Begin

The chatter in the Discord was constant with shops cropping up in the market left and right. Harkening back to my days roleplaying running a bar thread on forums, I gravitated towards creating my own business. I thought that providing a useful service would be the most viable, long-term thing I could do. I created the Dream Atlas. Originally, it was a subscription service where people paid me 3cr a day to have their business listed on the Atlas. By the end of the game, I was charging people 1.5-2kcr per listing as the subscription model was, shockingly, not popular with denizens.

After a few days, I knew I would want a memento of this time. This was lightning in a bottle, and we all knew it, so I started writing a daily diary entry from my character's perspective on what happened each day. I made it to Cycle 10 with them, the day the Choke Incursion happened, and after that I was too frustrated by the game to continue. I'll share them as they become relevant, but here's the first one.

Cycle 1 - 10/14/25

Got myself a little place in Block (37,03). It's not much, but it's enough for me and my cacti. The work at the docks been rough these last cycles. The skin on my forearms been showin' metal for weeks. I saw a couple specks of rust after shift. Hopefully I can get it fixed.

Joined the Union. Yeah, I'm a bit skeptical about the solidarity, but it's a paying job, you know? There's even a group for the droids, Androids Rights Alliance. Seems like good folk. I even made us Membership Cards, because why should we hide who we are?

Someone I don't know reached out to me about the Family. I admit, I was curious, but was I about to be murdered or recruited? I risked it and joined Bratva. It's hard not sharing with anybody right now. I think I can be of use to them with my side hustly, the Dream Atlas. It's an info station for available services on Dream, and while it's nothing fancy yet, I know it'll grow into being something worthwhile. Dream Big, they say.

Blink Out, Jules

A Love Letter to Lit Majors

If you're a literary person, you've no doubt caught most, if not all, the literary references that Over/Under was constantly using. However, if you're like me who needed a refresher on the classics, then you get to enjoy how Prospero's Dream and many of the events going on in the station have existed for a very long time in one form or another.

A Pound of Flesh

Over/Under is based on a module called A Pound of Flesh (APoF), a Mothership module about a space station called Prospero's Dream. The phrase "A Pound of Flesh" hails from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, while the name Prospero is from The Tempest. Many key characters in APoF are also key characters in The Tempest, namely Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel.

Like many other players in O/U, I failed to make the connection to literature until very late into the game. I remember when working on a message in the Code Breakers Club and encountering all of these references at once. Afterwards, I went running to my wife, a literature major, in the middle of the night, spouting what a sick ass modern retelling of the Tempest this Mothership module is.

Terminology

Even the terminology in APoF pulls from classic literature.

Code Breakers Club/Heimlich Expedition

Before either of these groups were founded, people were referencing and asking about the Choke. The Choke is a location on Prospero's Dream in APoF where people who can't pay their O2 Tax are sent to die. There's a town in the Choke called DOPtown (De-Oxygenated People). In O/U, players who were killed became De-Oxygenated People and were removed from any Discord channels or threads that were tied to Prospero's Dream.

Unsure as to whether it was real or not, or if people could return from it, some players were trying to pay other players to go to the Choke willingly. The Heimlich was a space created on 10/23 for getting into and out of the Choke by OnslaughtSix, playing as Berwick.

The Code Breakers Club (CBC) and the Heimlich Expedition had the first look at what was going to be a pivotal turning point in the game. While factions were conducting intel ops, ordering assassinations, and maintaining control of denizens, the CBC and Heimlich were cracking mysterious cyphers and messages that started appearing on the Dream. When it was all said and done, there were 3-4 different threads of Augmented Reality Games (ARGs) that were ongoing. A full list of the ciphers and their decoded message can be found here in this spreadsheet I created and maintained.

Once the Ariel ARG included the Choke, a lot of conversations happened simultaneously in both threads. However, here's a breakdown of the ongoing ciphers and secret messages that I knew about:

• CHC - They were sending encrypted messages that were broadcasted on the Dream. Any Boss could send a message for Sam to share, but these encrypted messages had no identified sender until the phrases were cracked.
• Ariel - A player joined with the name Zhenya, the name of the Discord bot that managed the O/U economy and roles. Zhenya spoke in machine language until we talked to her long enough for it to become binary and then eventual text and images. You can see all the images and message here on my public timeline.
• Cal - Created an ARG that was shared in piece meal in the CBC thread directly.
• 38:3 - A death cult that kept saying CHACHA and talked about doom and gloom coming on the 11th day. The 11th day was also the day where all the afk players would die.

With all of these happening on their own time by a variety of players and with no clear answer on what was GM sanctioned content from Sam, it's shocking that something like Choke Night didn't happen sooner.

Choke Night/Choke Incursion/Choke Event

The night you've all been waiting to read about, I'm sure! I tease, but it went by many names and no two players had the same experience. I can only share what I knew from a denizen point-of-view and what I've cobbled together from a variety of references in my post-OU reading. While it could probably serve to be its own post, I'm trying to keep it all in one for my sanity.

At the very beginning of the game, Chris Airiau - playing as Ramel Ebank's, a boss from the Canyonheavy Collective (CHC) - did a psyop, sharing about a threat is coming for the Dream. He used the phrase to put people into cells and discreetly share false information to each other. I never encountered it, but it coincided with everything else that was to come perfectly. The first group was called Cabal and had other faction bosses in it. You can listen to more about it here. The main takeaway is there's a threat beyond the factions that is happening, and some bosses believe it to be real.

Note: My only encounter with this term or phrase was through the Dream Crier who was actually Christian Sorrell of MeatCastle GameWare. He dual accounted for Over/Under and dropped the Dream Crier role once becoming a CHC Boss and after Sam pushed back against dual accounts.

As a Bratva member, I was aware of the fact that we only had 2 out our 3 bosses for the first week and a half of the game. Through Silviana (Babushka)'s soft power and Jordan DeWitt (the Vor)'s public image, the Bratva appeared strong in their ability to run and conduct business. They also had many undercover agents from the get go, mainly Lockley Vega (on the Board of Stratemeyer) and Jess (publisher of FinWire, a financial newspaper). With the third boss gone, Jess was revealed as an undercover agent and nominated for the third Boss position of Adjudicator. Then, Bratva peacefully eliminated Stratemeyer. Simultaneously, the CHC and Heimlich groups were spending a significant amount of time deciphering these codes, and the Ariel countdown hit 0 later that same day.

While Bratva is celebrating, the Solarian Church is gearing up to throw their first in-game holiday called Flare Day. This big celebration, inviting players from all factions to come and participate. I was managing Grash Uppem's stall at Flare Day when news of the Choke existing came to the bosses knowledge.

Unsure if the ARGs were GM sanctioned content or not, the Bosses did an intel op to ask Sam if the Choke existed. He confirmed this and provided 5 Blocks that were entrances to the Choke. He also shared plans of dead players becoming a rebel insurgent faction that never happened. I imagine it was dropped primarily from the backlash and miscommunication of Choke Night. Now, the Bosses are heavily involved, and the cool player facing content in CBC becomes sequestered into private threads as the factions come together to organize a team, a response, etc. to what they believe to be a real threat.

To recap, we had the following simultaneously:

• A psyop warning of a looming threat from Day 1
• A player-driven ARG with a countdown to 0 on Day 11 at 7 PM Station Time
• Sam confirming entrances to the Choke at specific Blocks

This gets further exacerbated once people begin to panic (so many folks failed that dang panic check haha). Flare Day is interrupted, and the holiday affairs are shut down as denizens return to their respective factions. Bosses share to their faction members that if they live at these blocks, they need to evacuate immediately.

Some players evacuated and/or were given funds to evacuate if need be. Then, a player with the handle, "Mouth of the Choke" begins private messaging O/U players and "infecting" them. Unsure if it was real or not, the panic is further fanned, and playesr fear dying from this "infection" when in reality it was all roleplay. Next thing you know, Bigdog Beefstink is in the public channels, ordering Tempest troops around and claiming he can see where the infected are from the Datacache.

On an out-of-character game level, Sam (our GM) and many of the bosses are offline, assuming the downfall of Stratemeyer would be the big event of the day. I've cobbled together a loose timeline of how Choke Night came to be.

Me, Bleeding Out

While I did roleplay on forums a lot as a teenager, I never did Live-Action Roleplay, or LARP, in any capacity. My younger sister does it, but it did not appeal to me in the same that online RP does. Therefore, I came into the game with zero knowledge of Bleed and how it impacts a person. There were also no safety tools put in place to handle the wide range of player experience coming into such a chaotic social experiment.

Airtight Intel

After this event though, safety tools were implemented as well as out-of-character channels called airlocks were provided to each faction and public space. From a game design perspective, it makes complete sense. It's necessary to provide these spaces to let out steam and ground yourself as a player. Yet, a select few players were navigating a much different game (the wargame) and any piece of text in the Discord server, in or out of character, became fair game. An excellent example of where this happened was when discussions for Cabral, a Tempest Boss, was set to be killed after the Vor, a Bratva Boss, was killed by Bigdog Beefstink played by Luke Gearing. Cabral's character was fleeing the scene, and the player put in parenthesis, commonly marking an out-of-character comment, said Cabral was fleeing.

What makes good RP?

In hindsight, it's no wonder the roleplay most players felt was sublime. The stakes felt real, and dying in a once-in-a-lifetime game like this felt horrible. Just ask Jenny. Players were having intense and heartfelt goodbyes for fear of their character dying. I remember being in a private thread with just Stevie Hexagons called The Pinebarrens, and we shared our addresses with each other during the chaos that was Choke Night. At one point, I thought Stevie was infected and took to the roleplay fiercely.

Safety Tools & Other Things

By now, it's clear how lacking the safety tools and guidelines were for players to engage with the space that was O/U. Even if Sam didn't expect hundreds of players to be as active as they were, alarm bells should have been going off once the activity from Day 1 was noticed. Many players, primarily bosses, took on the burden that Sam should have helped carry in grounding player expectations and providing clearer communication on what was GM sanction content and what wasn't. Unfortunately, this added yet another thing bosses were tracking and managing. With no clear guidance for Bosses, the level of support varied from faction to faction. I believe this contributed to why the Union fell apart the way it did.

Discord as a Game Space

I don't believe Sam or Sean considered how much of Discord built-in functions would come to be clever tactics in figuring out information, hiding identities, etc. I was disappointed I didn't think about some of these sooner, honestly.

• Player Databases: Using the public knowledge of Discord roles and permissions, players were able to learn a lot about denizens and bosses, using it as a way to sell information. Some players, like GorillaOne and Shelms, used this to create Private Investigator firms and sell data.
• Invisible Status: Keeping yourself Invisible in private channels meant you didn't show up on the list. For example, both Lockley and Jess had access to the Bratva channel, since they had the Bratva role. Yet, they weren't able to chat in the public channel or have their Discord status as online, or they would have been discovered.
• Dual Accounts: I thought about doing this to get into a different faction, but it felt against the spirit of things. This was later confirmed by Sam himself, but I imagine many players had multiple accounts.
• Joining a Thread: Unless being pinged into a thread, you could view a thread without joining it.
• Public vs. Private Threads: If you weren't careful in creating a private thread, then you accidentally shared public information. Sometimes this was intentionally done to trip people up, and other times it was pure accident. Either way, it became a tool to get information or ferret out player motives.

Keeping the Peace

Coming off the adrenaline of Choke Night left me feeling burnt out and unwanted as a player, which I took personally due to how much Bleed I was experiencing. At this point, I've stopped keeping a player diary, because I was determined to quit the game altogether. It wasn't until I read the out-of-character message from Silviana that I even considered staying around. She was one of the few bosses that felt an obligation to provide support and guidance for her faction members that contributed to the absurd undying loyalty that many Bratva members, myself included, felt for her character.

Violence through Roleplay

Since the factions had rallied together for Choke Night, it appeared keeping the peace and maintaining civil unrest became the new job for bosses. Player agency and some rogue bosses had other ideas in mind.

An Eye for an Eye Earlier I spoke about how the roleplay and denizen behavior impacted the wargame layer of the game. The level of emergent roleplaying forced bosses into specific positions. While Cataphracts is positioned as a wargame, I think given the multitude of players, it became much more of a social game. The Vor, played by Jordan, killed a DJ through roleplay at a public bar while also injuring other denizens. The social fallout from this roleplaying event allowed for Tempest to seek the Vor's head so they will not start war with Bratva. In the end, Jordan's character died, and Cabral from Tempest was eventually assassinated. Again, the exchange seemed to entirely start from a roleplaying incident that had impact on the wargame level as denizens were elevated to boss status.

Deathmatch Since factions were vying to keep the peace and maintain their win conditions which were primarily exclusive to each other, the denizens of the Dream took it upon themselves to make their own entertainment. This took the form of a deathmatch wherein 8 players agreed to a fight to the death with only 1 winner. All losers would be manually killed by Sam. Wild, right? I watched the fight and even put money on a few folks. One of the people who were part of my recruiting gang, Doc, fought and died. Beforehand, Doc came to Prospero's Trust to create a deposit box and leave a note for someone in case they died.

This intense and heartfelt moment was player driven and not at all dictated by the wargame above us. I cannot overstate the level of emergent cameplay that came from this experiment, haha. It was incredible to be part of and felt more real with each player that kept "Yes, and.."-ing everything.

Game Economy

I've talked about this a bit already on how players were resources, but the idea really came to light after the Deathmatch. Most of the players who died were Bratva which meant our faction not only lost valuable players but also income. Those players now couldn't tax any Blocks for us. I recall having a conversation with another Bratva member who talked about letting the O2 Tax take them, but a boss told them not to so they could still be a resource in the game.

This is talked about in much more depth by the person who played XO Tan, a denizen turned boss in Tempest. They're currently developing their own Cataphracts game that I'm eager to follow development on. The bottom line is, the spouts and sinks of the economy meant a lot of inflation which was fine in the grand scheme of things.

And what of it?

With PAX Unplugged right around the corner, many players were attending the convention and wanted to do an O/U meetup! Sam and some other bosses were going to be around as well.

Some folks made buttons for factions and used the O/U logo. Others 3D printed Prospero's Dream. It was cool to put a real-life face to the player and chat about the experience. Silviana who played the Obshchak missed the meet-up, but I heard she was at PAX and asked to meet up one-on-one with her as she was a player I had a lot of interaction with. I have no picture to share of our meet-up, because I didn't think to take one! Oh well, next time, haha. Again, it was awesome and gave a nice sense of closure to something that ate up a month of my life.

Conclusion

After all this, many of the O/U players have stayed in touch with one another through private Discord servers. Players have started created third-party pamphlets to create additional locations on the Dream. I'm currently working on one for Prospero's Trust, and I know the Prospero's Dream Postal Service (PDPS) is working on one as well.

Over/Under was an experiment that I am very delighted to have participated in. The highs and lows were extremes in the way I experienced them, and it did consume the larger part of my online time for it duration. Still, I became friends with people I met, I've played and run Mothership with some of the O/U folks, and I've made some super cool ttrpg contacts. While I didn't get to participate or be included in everything I wanted to, I had a fulfilling story for my character and played a larger role than I expected to on the Dream.

As Jules, Grash, and Jasmine would say, Stay Golden and Keep Dreaming.

Additional Reading/Listening

• My Public Timeline of Events in O/U
• The Economics of Over/Under
• Incomprehensive Collection of O/U Things
• O/U Blog Directory and Other Things
• Bastionland Podcast with Amanda Lee Franck
• Ansible Uplink Podcast with Reece Carter, Luke Gearing, and Chris Airiau
• Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character

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